American Horror - vo.rs

Phantasm: Coscarelli's Dream-Logic Nightmare

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Phantasm should not work. On paper it is a jumble — a killer mortician, a flying silver ball that drills into skulls, hooded dwarves, a portal to another planet, and a thirteen-year-old boy on a bicycle trying to convince anyone that his brother is in danger. Written down, it reads like four films shuffled together and dealt at random. Watched, it plays like something far more coherent and far stranger: a child’s nightmare, transcribed with the compressed, associative logic that dreams actually use. Don Coscarelli was twenty-four when he made it in 1979, financing it himself, shooting it on weekends over a long stretch, doing the camerawork and the editing with his own hands. What he produced is one of the few horror films that genuinely thinks the way the unconscious does.

Messiah of Evil: The Dreamlike Lost Horror of the 70s

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Messiah of Evil is the kind of film that convinces you, watching it at two in the morning, that you have wandered into someone else’s dream and cannot find the door out. It was made in 1973 by Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz — a married writing team who, the very next year, would help George Lucas write American Graffiti, and who would later take the blame for scripting Howard the Duck. That biography tells you nothing about the film they made here, which is one of the strangest, most beautiful, and most thoroughly mishandled horror pictures of its decade. It was chopped up, retitled, dumped into grindhouses as Dead People and Revenge of the Screaming Dead, and left to rot in ugly prints for thirty years. Restored and seen clearly, it turns out to be a small, haunted marvel.

Let's Scare Jessica to Death: The Quiet American Unease

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 08:00:00 +0000

The title is the worst thing about Let’s Scare Jessica to Death. It sounds like a drive-in shocker, a gimmick picture, the kind of thing sold on a lurid one-sheet and forgotten by Monday. What John D. Hancock actually made in 1971 is one of the quietest, most genuinely unnerving American horror films of its decade — a whispering, water-logged mood piece that spends ninety minutes refusing to tell you whether anything supernatural is happening at all. It has been rescued from obscurity slowly, by word of mouth and the odd revival screening, and every rescue has run up against that ridiculous title. Get past it. The film beneath is a small masterpiece of ambiguity.

Tobe Hooper: The Texas Trailblazer

Mon, 04 Nov 2024 14:00:00 +0000

There is a version of Tobe Hooper’s story that begins and ends with one film, and it is the version most obituaries reached for when he died in 2017. It sells him short. Hooper made a masterpiece at thirty and spent the next four decades being underestimated by an industry that had already decided what he was. Track the whole filmography, though, and a real artist emerges: a maker fascinated by texture, by heat, by the way a camera can lie about what it is showing you. The trailblazing was never a one-off. It was a temperament.